While you're mad as a sack of spiders I cannot help but admire how you've managed to work both the masons and regicide into a discussion about facebook privacy.
While I'd say that it would be possible to remain incognito on facebook with caution and a sprinkling of technical knowledge if they rescind their real names policy, the EU at least is finally making moves to restrict its ability to transfer data to regimes with fewer protections for proviacy.
Real names are far more useful to bullies than otherwise as they allow bullies to track people over multiple platforms, find their phone numbers, place of work, even track them right to their front doors. A real names policy does little to stop trolls either, they just register a burner account and troll until they get kicked off, it's not hard to do.
I'm solidly in favour of this EFF petition and I hope everyone signs, like it or not facebook is the de facto means of mass communication on the internet for most people today. They already have way too much power and have proven themselves more than happy to abuse that power in ways that would have gotten an accountable entity shut down hard, any moves to curb their influence and reach must be supported.
Well that doesn't reflect my experience at all, but we're comparing what people find interesting so it becomes a battle of the anecdotes. In terms of fantasy, paranormal, or science fiction I feel I've far more and better options than twenty or even ten years ago.
Indie authors and musicians are not "sharply on the rise".
A swing and a miss. I believe the author of "The Martian" was an indie. Self publishing is taking off in a big way - but don't take my word for it, google it yourself.
And to think that stronger and longer IP protections is the reason behind the rise of indie artists is just dumb.
Not just small independent artists but large corporations also, stronger protections make creative work more valuable (this can't be disputed) and encourage higher quality. I mean who wants to put in a lot of time and effort if some nimrod is just going to filch it. However they apply to ALL creative work, not just whatever is put forth by Sony.
The people who say "stronger and longer IP protections is good for creativity" are almost universally people who have never done anything creative.
Funny, I was just thinking that people who say "stronger and longer IP protections strangle creativity" are almost universally people who not only have never done anything creative but who probably freeload off the people who do the creative work.
What you're increasingly desperately trying to do is frame this in terms of cigar-smoking capitalist Snidely Whiplashes lording it over poor toiling peasants who don't own the means of production, except they actually do. Welcome to the 21st century, marxism is worse than useless here.
Obviously this doesn't mean I support the entire treaty, at least until I see it.
Stronger IP protections are generally being welcomed by the creative types I know.
"Stronger IP protections" are not for the "creative types you know". They're for the ownership types you know.
I've no idea why you think the two are mutually exclusive. Indie authors and musicians for example are sharply on the rise, in terms of cinema while the blockbusters will forever remain in the hands of corporations there's a lot of decent quality amateur stuff coming out. Everything you write, you have immediate copyright protections on, that's how easy it is to take advantage of stronger copyright law.
I'll put it to you like this - with stronger and longer recent IP protections recently, have you noticed a decrease or an increase in creative output?
With that said I'd oppose criminalising non-profit copyright infringements or attempts to eat into existing fair use standards.
Stronger IP protections are generally being welcomed by the creative types I know. I haven't heard much about the rest of the treaty and neither has anyone else so I'm a little puzzled as to what all the chicken littling is about.
You can change your behaviour. You can change your opinion. You can even change your religion. You can't change the colour of your skin or whether or not you were born with nuts, drastic surgery excluded. That's why making racism and sexism of any sort acceptable, in particular under the flag of some warped version of "justice" is particularly dangerous. Because once it becomes acceptable to hate there is no final destination, it keeps on rolling until someone rolls it back, and no matter which direction the pendulum swings the situation is usually worse than it was to begin with. That's the difference.
There's a good reason collective punishment is usually viewed as a war crime. If you go down that road you end up asking why people with white skin, English, Irish, French, American, Polish, Russian, all of them aren't generally being punished for the crimes of the Nazis generations later, or even just Germans. Or why stop there, maybe Mongolia owes Iran reparations for the actions of Genghis Khan. Islamic states should pay for the conquest of Spain perhaps?
Some peoples' attitudes do need to change but what the "millennials", which is to say that subset of American youth who've been fed various offcolour sociological activist theories - not an entire generation by a long shot - need to understand is that if you rope in everyone as guilty you end up creating a reaction and creating problems which never needed to exist in the first place.
If some of their stuff is trademarked they may have no choice but to chase down infringements, trademarks must be actively defended to remain legitimate.
an embarrassing counter-example to American and western democracy's political claims against communism
Sure, if thousands of executions by firing squad with little to no due process, mass imprisonment and thousands more being "vanished" would embarrass you. They certainly don't embarrass Marxists. As good old Ché, Castro’s chief enforcer put it, "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate." All of course while El Jefe himself was living it up on a private island paradise, feathering his bed with drug deals.
People wander across the street randomly, and drivers are very aware that this is going to happen, so they slow down.
Yeah same in this locality, it's fine once you keep your eyes open and watch out for blind spots. As such many of the comments in this story are weird to me - people seem less worried about the fact of killing someone with their car than about the legal liability for doing so.
That's still pretty thin ice if you get nasty enough, saying "in my opinion" isn't a panacea.
Back on topic, this is the most completely insane and frankly evil idea I've heard in a long time. There is no possible good that can come from this, and a whole lot of bad. I was pretty unhappy with the surveillance society up to this point but it just got a great deal worse. May they be sued into the dictionary as a salutary lesson regarding the fate of those who implement really bad ideas. I want future generations to refer to any company that pops the cork on a bottle of champagne and rams the business straight into a brick wall as being "yelped".
I wasn't originally planning on going into detail about bad behavior by the Church, but you had to go and wave the red flag. So suck this up. The number of people executed by the Spanish Inquisition is estimated to be between 3000 and 5000.
Was that supposed to rock me back on my heels or something? Have you any idea about the period under discussion? Genghis Khan put 40 million people to the sword by one means or another not long beforehand, double Stalin's total. The Black Death put between a quarter and a third of the population of Europe in the ground. It was a very nasty period with very nasty people doing very nasty things. Which brings us neatly to the next point.
Your argument that it's OK because of other good works is completely morally corrupt.
Good thing that's not the argument I was making then, isn't it. I said in the context of the times, the Church while no shining beacon of light was probably better than most, not that the crimes of the Church are perfectly okay.
Because that's your position translated to a more obnoxious context.
Amp it up, amp it up, make sure any disagreement with your hate gets classified as hate.
Even the slightest examination of history shows that religious authority over peoples live inevitably results in revolting behavior.
Funnily enough you could say the same about most Marxist regimes, except with more mass murder.
The final insult is your hypocrisy.
Maybe if you read what was actually written you'd have fewer windmills to tilt at.
I'm not sure why you think pointing to religious observances in a religious organisation might somehow be damaging. There are many different viewpoints one could take, from potential psychological benefits that (usually religious) people who believe themselves to be possessed might gain to aspects of the universe that science doesn't yet understand. The latter in particular would emphasise the limits of our own current knowledge and that science isn't a closed book, which is more pro-science than otherwise.
Likewise in religions like Buddhism, the various planes of existence have been interpreted by some as representative of mental states which can be improved by meditation and chanting, it's a nuanced picture.
As for the historical record, again it's a complex issue. On the whole the Church has generally been one of the few groups that regularly gave consideration to those less fortunate given the context of the times, and keep in mind that the times were savage almost beyond modern comprehension. Galileo was less punished for his views than for calling an absolute medieval monarch a dickhead. The crusades followed and were a response to centuries of Islamic expansionism, including the invasion and conquest of Spain, which also contributed to the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. It's very far from a clean record, but the history of Europe throughout the existence of the church is a whole lot dirtier.
I'm deeply amused by the recent leftist backlash against anti-Islamism among atheists. I mean it's been lumbering over the horizon for a while now but the question was which ideology would better serve the requirements of the left, and of course Islam wins hands down. Schisms ahoy!
That's a bit simplistic. If the target audience is statistical management types those 300 views could translate to more value for the publication than an article about panties, but it depends on the publication, which is why you don't usually see in-depth scholalry research in the red tops. The red tops and clickbaiters also make much more money than most academic publications but that's their entire purpose. Once the metrics are calibrated correctly quality can indeed be measured and used to improve a publication's offerings.
Oh yeah that's what I meant, in that aggregate data for a limited time is probably alright and would fulfill most "practical and economical reasons" for corporations. What facebook does is absolutely not alright. It's the opposite of alright.
So to get back on topic, it's obvious a treaty won't work because only those who cheat can win
Hardly. I don't spy on your citizens and I don't spy on my citizens, if you spy on my citizens I levy sanctions and penalties against you, as well as relations being soured which is not an insiginificant thing.
and if the cheat is the world's only superpower, who do we think is going to punish them, God? anyone who can remember 9/11 can also remember GWB spitting the dummy at the UN and announcing to the entire world the US can not be restained by anyone. It's also obvious that the currently agreed upon human rights are not fully respected by any nation, and are totally irrelevant to (say) Saudi Arabia.
So we should abandon aspirations towards human rights because Saudi Arabia or North Korea don't play along? The fundamental issue here is recognising privacy as a basic human right, whether or not the entire world goes along with it immediately is irrelevant. It's a step in the right direction.
Even if US and EU stopped surveilling, other actors would still do it.
All that means is the US and EU would then be mandated to stop these other actors from surveilling their citizens, which is exactly as it should be. To a certain extent the EU is already doing this.
Some, like FB, would do it for practical and economical reasons, just because there are server logs and they need to optimize advertising and user engagement.
Aggregate data and broad trends used for very specific purposes then discarded are very different to individualised data to be sold on or stored indefinetely.
Other, like various totalitarian regimes, would still do it because they see it as a counterbalance for the increased social activism powered by the increase in connectivity that has permeated all societies.
Totalitarian regimes already do lots of things that would be completely unacceptable in western democracies, why should surveillance get a free pass here.
Even if countries didn't do it, corporations and various shady groups would still do it. All it takes is to put a monitor on the pipe or a video camera on the highway to record everything that passes through there. And when one party does it, all parties need to do it to keep up and not come at a disadvantage in security.
There seems to be a weird shibboleth doing the rounds on slashdot that corporations are somehow above the law. They aren't, and when they break the law they get caught sooner or later. I mean by the above logic we may as well make murder legal since laws against murder haven't put an end to murder.
So we need to adjust our social standards to allow for more diversity, because now we all live in a panopticon and there's no turning back to the privacy and anonymity times of our parents.
Are you seriously trying to turn an Orwellian nightmare into a social justice issue? I mean I get what you're trying to say, we should all relax a bit instead of the usual internet performance of getting wound up to ninety but privacy is a battle that can most definetely be won.
And now we need to accept the reality of our panopticon society and build a better way of living in it.
Have you got a single source for this bizarre fairytale? Politicians are the party elite in China, look at one the wrong way and you'll find out pretty quick how much power they have.
Where "natural" means "temperatures increased by 7C or more in a few decades... Broad regions of the Earth experienced almost synchronous changes over periods of 0 to 30 years (Severinghaus et al., 1998), and changes were very abrupt in at least some regions (Bard et al., 1987), e.g. requiring as little as 10 years off Venezuela" we're in pretty good shape here.
If you want to see climate change that would have a devastating impact on our civilisation, look no further than the Dryas events which took place not only relatively recently but entirely without any influence from humanity. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports...
by far the cheapest way of dealing with it is to deal with it right now.
That's the thing though - it is being dealt with right now. Even if someone believes that mankind has had no significant influence on the climate in this really obviously warming interglacial period (many people are posting from locations that were buried under deep ice a few tens of thousands of years ago), most would agree that the move to renewables and cleaner emissions being mandated by a lot of governments is a good thing.
Where the major disagreement seems to arise is in how quickly we need to complete that move. As far as I can see by the end of this century fossil fuels will be largely a thing of the past in all of their forms - and that's perfectly acceptable. It's a trade off between the large amounts of economic damage - including to things like pension funds relied upon by grannies for their old age - that could be caused immediately versus a relatively minor change in a global climate that's seen gargantuan changes without any interference from humanity very recently in geological terms.
Slashdot Mirror
While you're mad as a sack of spiders I cannot help but admire how you've managed to work both the masons and regicide into a discussion about facebook privacy.
While I'd say that it would be possible to remain incognito on facebook with caution and a sprinkling of technical knowledge if they rescind their real names policy, the EU at least is finally making moves to restrict its ability to transfer data to regimes with fewer protections for proviacy.
Real names are far more useful to bullies than otherwise as they allow bullies to track people over multiple platforms, find their phone numbers, place of work, even track them right to their front doors. A real names policy does little to stop trolls either, they just register a burner account and troll until they get kicked off, it's not hard to do.
I'm solidly in favour of this EFF petition and I hope everyone signs, like it or not facebook is the de facto means of mass communication on the internet for most people today. They already have way too much power and have proven themselves more than happy to abuse that power in ways that would have gotten an accountable entity shut down hard, any moves to curb their influence and reach must be supported.
"Creative output"? No change whatsoever.
Well that doesn't reflect my experience at all, but we're comparing what people find interesting so it becomes a battle of the anecdotes. In terms of fantasy, paranormal, or science fiction I feel I've far more and better options than twenty or even ten years ago.
Indie authors and musicians are not "sharply on the rise".
A swing and a miss. I believe the author of "The Martian" was an indie. Self publishing is taking off in a big way - but don't take my word for it, google it yourself.
And to think that stronger and longer IP protections is the reason behind the rise of indie artists is just dumb.
Not just small independent artists but large corporations also, stronger protections make creative work more valuable (this can't be disputed) and encourage higher quality. I mean who wants to put in a lot of time and effort if some nimrod is just going to filch it. However they apply to ALL creative work, not just whatever is put forth by Sony.
The people who say "stronger and longer IP protections is good for creativity" are almost universally people who have never done anything creative.
Funny, I was just thinking that people who say "stronger and longer IP protections strangle creativity" are almost universally people who not only have never done anything creative but who probably freeload off the people who do the creative work.
What you're increasingly desperately trying to do is frame this in terms of cigar-smoking capitalist Snidely Whiplashes lording it over poor toiling peasants who don't own the means of production, except they actually do. Welcome to the 21st century, marxism is worse than useless here.
Obviously this doesn't mean I support the entire treaty, at least until I see it.
"Stronger IP protections" are not for the "creative types you know". They're for the ownership types you know.
I've no idea why you think the two are mutually exclusive. Indie authors and musicians for example are sharply on the rise, in terms of cinema while the blockbusters will forever remain in the hands of corporations there's a lot of decent quality amateur stuff coming out. Everything you write, you have immediate copyright protections on, that's how easy it is to take advantage of stronger copyright law.
I'll put it to you like this - with stronger and longer recent IP protections recently, have you noticed a decrease or an increase in creative output?
With that said I'd oppose criminalising non-profit copyright infringements or attempts to eat into existing fair use standards.
Stronger IP protections are generally being welcomed by the creative types I know. I haven't heard much about the rest of the treaty and neither has anyone else so I'm a little puzzled as to what all the chicken littling is about.
You can change your behaviour. You can change your opinion. You can even change your religion. You can't change the colour of your skin or whether or not you were born with nuts, drastic surgery excluded. That's why making racism and sexism of any sort acceptable, in particular under the flag of some warped version of "justice" is particularly dangerous. Because once it becomes acceptable to hate there is no final destination, it keeps on rolling until someone rolls it back, and no matter which direction the pendulum swings the situation is usually worse than it was to begin with. That's the difference.
There's a good reason collective punishment is usually viewed as a war crime. If you go down that road you end up asking why people with white skin, English, Irish, French, American, Polish, Russian, all of them aren't generally being punished for the crimes of the Nazis generations later, or even just Germans. Or why stop there, maybe Mongolia owes Iran reparations for the actions of Genghis Khan. Islamic states should pay for the conquest of Spain perhaps?
Some peoples' attitudes do need to change but what the "millennials", which is to say that subset of American youth who've been fed various offcolour sociological activist theories - not an entire generation by a long shot - need to understand is that if you rope in everyone as guilty you end up creating a reaction and creating problems which never needed to exist in the first place.
If some of their stuff is trademarked they may have no choice but to chase down infringements, trademarks must be actively defended to remain legitimate.
an embarrassing counter-example to American and western democracy's political claims against communism
Sure, if thousands of executions by firing squad with little to no due process, mass imprisonment and thousands more being "vanished" would embarrass you. They certainly don't embarrass Marxists. As good old Ché, Castro’s chief enforcer put it, "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution. And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate." All of course while El Jefe himself was living it up on a private island paradise, feathering his bed with drug deals.
People wander across the street randomly, and drivers are very aware that this is going to happen, so they slow down.
Yeah same in this locality, it's fine once you keep your eyes open and watch out for blind spots. As such many of the comments in this story are weird to me - people seem less worried about the fact of killing someone with their car than about the legal liability for doing so.
That's still pretty thin ice if you get nasty enough, saying "in my opinion" isn't a panacea.
Back on topic, this is the most completely insane and frankly evil idea I've heard in a long time. There is no possible good that can come from this, and a whole lot of bad. I was pretty unhappy with the surveillance society up to this point but it just got a great deal worse. May they be sued into the dictionary as a salutary lesson regarding the fate of those who implement really bad ideas. I want future generations to refer to any company that pops the cork on a bottle of champagne and rams the business straight into a brick wall as being "yelped".
Struck a nerve, did we? :D I'm good, I've got my popcorn a'popping and my feet on the coffee table to watch the show, so carry on.
It's not as though you have any choice in the matter.
I wasn't originally planning on going into detail about bad behavior by the Church, but you had to go and wave the red flag. So suck this up.
The number of people executed by the Spanish Inquisition is estimated to be between 3000 and 5000.
Was that supposed to rock me back on my heels or something? Have you any idea about the period under discussion? Genghis Khan put 40 million people to the sword by one means or another not long beforehand, double Stalin's total. The Black Death put between a quarter and a third of the population of Europe in the ground. It was a very nasty period with very nasty people doing very nasty things. Which brings us neatly to the next point.
Your argument that it's OK because of other good works is completely morally corrupt.
Good thing that's not the argument I was making then, isn't it. I said in the context of the times, the Church while no shining beacon of light was probably better than most, not that the crimes of the Church are perfectly okay.
Because that's your position translated to a more obnoxious context.
Amp it up, amp it up, make sure any disagreement with your hate gets classified as hate.
Even the slightest examination of history shows that religious authority over peoples live inevitably results in revolting behavior.
Funnily enough you could say the same about most Marxist regimes, except with more mass murder.
The final insult is your hypocrisy.
Maybe if you read what was actually written you'd have fewer windmills to tilt at.
And don't worry, I have plenty more insults.
I'm not sure why you think pointing to religious observances in a religious organisation might somehow be damaging. There are many different viewpoints one could take, from potential psychological benefits that (usually religious) people who believe themselves to be possessed might gain to aspects of the universe that science doesn't yet understand. The latter in particular would emphasise the limits of our own current knowledge and that science isn't a closed book, which is more pro-science than otherwise.
Likewise in religions like Buddhism, the various planes of existence have been interpreted by some as representative of mental states which can be improved by meditation and chanting, it's a nuanced picture.
As for the historical record, again it's a complex issue. On the whole the Church has generally been one of the few groups that regularly gave consideration to those less fortunate given the context of the times, and keep in mind that the times were savage almost beyond modern comprehension. Galileo was less punished for his views than for calling an absolute medieval monarch a dickhead. The crusades followed and were a response to centuries of Islamic expansionism, including the invasion and conquest of Spain, which also contributed to the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition. It's very far from a clean record, but the history of Europe throughout the existence of the church is a whole lot dirtier.
I'm deeply amused by the recent leftist backlash against anti-Islamism among atheists. I mean it's been lumbering over the horizon for a while now but the question was which ideology would better serve the requirements of the left, and of course Islam wins hands down. Schisms ahoy!
That's a bit simplistic. If the target audience is statistical management types those 300 views could translate to more value for the publication than an article about panties, but it depends on the publication, which is why you don't usually see in-depth scholalry research in the red tops. The red tops and clickbaiters also make much more money than most academic publications but that's their entire purpose. Once the metrics are calibrated correctly quality can indeed be measured and used to improve a publication's offerings.
Oh yeah that's what I meant, in that aggregate data for a limited time is probably alright and would fulfill most "practical and economical reasons" for corporations. What facebook does is absolutely not alright. It's the opposite of alright.
So to get back on topic, it's obvious a treaty won't work because only those who cheat can win
Hardly. I don't spy on your citizens and I don't spy on my citizens, if you spy on my citizens I levy sanctions and penalties against you, as well as relations being soured which is not an insiginificant thing.
and if the cheat is the world's only superpower, who do we think is going to punish them, God? anyone who can remember 9/11 can also remember GWB spitting the dummy at the UN and announcing to the entire world the US can not be restained by anyone. It's also obvious that the currently agreed upon human rights are not fully respected by any nation, and are totally irrelevant to (say) Saudi Arabia.
So we should abandon aspirations towards human rights because Saudi Arabia or North Korea don't play along? The fundamental issue here is recognising privacy as a basic human right, whether or not the entire world goes along with it immediately is irrelevant. It's a step in the right direction.
Even if US and EU stopped surveilling, other actors would still do it.
All that means is the US and EU would then be mandated to stop these other actors from surveilling their citizens, which is exactly as it should be. To a certain extent the EU is already doing this.
Some, like FB, would do it for practical and economical reasons, just because there are server logs and they need to optimize advertising and user engagement.
Aggregate data and broad trends used for very specific purposes then discarded are very different to individualised data to be sold on or stored indefinetely.
Other, like various totalitarian regimes, would still do it because they see it as a counterbalance for the increased social activism powered by the increase in connectivity that has permeated all societies.
Totalitarian regimes already do lots of things that would be completely unacceptable in western democracies, why should surveillance get a free pass here.
Even if countries didn't do it, corporations and various shady groups would still do it. All it takes is to put a monitor on the pipe or a video camera on the highway to record everything that passes through there. And when one party does it, all parties need to do it to keep up and not come at a disadvantage in security.
There seems to be a weird shibboleth doing the rounds on slashdot that corporations are somehow above the law. They aren't, and when they break the law they get caught sooner or later. I mean by the above logic we may as well make murder legal since laws against murder haven't put an end to murder.
So we need to adjust our social standards to allow for more diversity, because now we all live in a panopticon and there's no turning back to the privacy and anonymity times of our parents.
Are you seriously trying to turn an Orwellian nightmare into a social justice issue? I mean I get what you're trying to say, we should all relax a bit instead of the usual internet performance of getting wound up to ninety but privacy is a battle that can most definetely be won.
And now we need to accept the reality of our panopticon society and build a better way of living in it.
Sod that.
Plus it runs the risk of making entertainment political, and way too many things have been made political which never should have been lately.
Have you got a single source for this bizarre fairytale? Politicians are the party elite in China, look at one the wrong way and you'll find out pretty quick how much power they have.
At this rate, I don't see anything suggesting that we're really seriously taking the steps needed to get off of fossil fuels before it gets ugly.
Maybe you should try researching what's going on before posting then.
Where "natural" means "temperatures increased by 7C or more in a few decades ... Broad regions of the Earth experienced almost synchronous changes over periods of 0 to 30 years (Severinghaus et al., 1998), and changes were very abrupt in at least some regions (Bard et al., 1987), e.g. requiring as little as 10 years off Venezuela" we're in pretty good shape here.
If you want to see climate change that would have a devastating impact on our civilisation, look no further than the Dryas events which took place not only relatively recently but entirely without any influence from humanity. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports...
by far the cheapest way of dealing with it is to deal with it right now.
That's the thing though - it is being dealt with right now. Even if someone believes that mankind has had no significant influence on the climate in this really obviously warming interglacial period (many people are posting from locations that were buried under deep ice a few tens of thousands of years ago), most would agree that the move to renewables and cleaner emissions being mandated by a lot of governments is a good thing.
Where the major disagreement seems to arise is in how quickly we need to complete that move. As far as I can see by the end of this century fossil fuels will be largely a thing of the past in all of their forms - and that's perfectly acceptable. It's a trade off between the large amounts of economic damage - including to things like pension funds relied upon by grannies for their old age - that could be caused immediately versus a relatively minor change in a global climate that's seen gargantuan changes without any interference from humanity very recently in geological terms.
So basically everyone chill, no pun intended.